


Always Been the Same, Same Old Story

by maplemood



Series: girl!Peter [7]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Domestic, Families of Choice, Father-Daughter Relationship, Female Peter Quill, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Kid Fic, Male-Female Friendship, Memories, Mother-Son Relationship, Motherhood, Parenthood, Past Character Death, Rule 63, Unconventional Families, girl!Peter, of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 13:07:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14237949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: “I was supposed to be the cool aunt! Not, like, the mean forty-year-old spinster aunt with plastic covers on her couches.”(Or, on a ship full of war criminals and lab experiments, Pete gets to be the bad guy.Go fucking figure.)





	Always Been the Same, Same Old Story

**Author's Note:**

> In honor of the Infinity War clips we've seen so far, I thought a Pete & teen Groot fic was in order. :)

“Unbelievable.” Pete boosts herself onto the galley’s counter, slamming ass to metal so hard the overhead cabinets rattle and Rocket, who’s perched on the corner of one, almost plummets into her lap. “He’s been in there half an hour. Almost forty minutes, I swear to God.”

“You’re timing the kid’s showers now?” Rocket scoffs. “Well, I just came up with a brand-new game. Real crowd-pleaser, this one.”

He winds up to beam his shiny, new, totally combustible gizmo at her head. Pete shifts just in time.

“I call it _Pervert...Or Buzzkill_?”

She grinds her teeth. Little bastard always knows what will sting the most. He’s like a walking paper cut. “I’m the life of the goddamn party, rat-face.”

“Groot’s growing up.” Gamora swings the conversation back to its original target, her face unreadable. She clamps a hand to either side of Pete’s waist and shifts her neatly out of the way before reaching for a box of sweetener packets. Powdered extract of honeyroot—apparently Thanos isn’t a fan and since her escape Gamora’s become a junkie for the stuff. “He’s practically a teenager.”

“And? I’m not following here. Groot’s a teenager, so showers are free?” Pete raises her voice. “Water doesn’t grow on trees!”

She’s dumb enough to expect at least some slack in the steady, drumming flow. If anything, it gets louder.

Gamora’s lips quirk. Pete feels hers thin. She waits for flowers of compassion and understanding to bloom in her gut, but no dice—the calming, pollen-golden magic Mom was so full of (so full that Pete always assumed it was genetic, passed down like chromosomes) has been supplanted by a louder, nastier voice. Nurture rubbing nature’s face in the dirt.

Which, by the way, is what she’s imagined doing to the freshly gangly, freshly pissy specimen who used to be their Groot a time too many.

“Forty-five minutes,” Rocket says. He hops off the cabinet and nudges her shoulder. “Let’s switch off the grav generator again.”

Gamora snickers. In three years the sound’s gone from nonexistent to nearly familiar; Pete has to grin even though she’s about to get caught back up in her _Dirt, meet Groot’s face_ daydreams. Hey, it’s not like she’d ever actually carry them out. And, given his biological composition, there’s no guarantee Groot 2.0 wouldn’t enjoy a mouthful of mud, anyway. The kid already eats bugs.

The daydreams keep her tethered to the counter until the fifty-minute mark. Pete slides down and stomps out of the galley, leaving Rocket and Gamora to their hyucking because on a ship full of war criminals and lab experiments, she gets to be the bad guy.

Go fucking figure.

He’s locked the door to the showers. Pete smacks her open palm against it. “Hey, Sunflower!” she shouts. “I think your hair’s as clean as it’s ever gonna get.”

No answer but a low, rustling grumbling. She rolls her eyes. “It’s been an hour.”

“I am Groot.”

“Fifty-two minutes? Well, pardon _me_.”

A pause, another rustle. From the sound of it the water pressure dials down a notch.

Pete rolls her eyes again. “Not gonna cut it. Out.”

“I am Groot!”

She bites her lip. _Come on, Quill. You can do this._

_Be the bigger person._

_Don’t do what_ he _would have done._

It’s all a tremendous pain in the ass, and in the end she settles for cutting it in half. Ditch the understanding, but also the yelling—that’s fair, isn’t it?

“I’m gonna go take a piss,” Pete says. “And when I get out you’d better be out, too, or I will get Rocket to pick this lock.”

“I am Groot! I am—”

For a second she thanks her lucky stars he still is holed up in the showers. At least he can’t see her practically sprinting to outrun the sound of his whining. God Almighty, it’s the worst. Every time he starts up like this Pete slides that much closer to throttling someone.

“I drank two cups of coffee for breakfast!” she throws over her shoulder. “You got four more minutes!”

Groot howls after her. Pete grits her teeth.

+

“Small Groot is testy,” Drax mutters through his last mouthful of protein bake. “Why?”

Pete passes him her almost untouched plate. “Why don’t you cool it with the nicknames, huh, dude? He’s not a seedling anymore,” she mutters back.

“So it was something you did,” Drax says, without a flicker of surprise.

Well, then why the hell did he bother asking? Pete grabs for the plate but Drax, with reflexes honed whipping-fast—nearly as good as Rocket’s—stuffs her entire piece into his mouth.

“Don’t blame me for your parental shortcomings, Quill,” he says after a painful gulp. “I am excellent with children.”

For the third time today and approximately the sixtieth time this week (it’s a Tuesday) Pete rolls her eyes. “Okay, Mr. Rogers, next time you can make sure he doesn’t spend the next fifty years jacking off in the shower.”

“Petra!” Gamora snaps.

Right. She and Drax shockingly aren’t the only two people in the galley around dinner time—really, it is sort of shocking, since Rocket, for reasons unknown and better left unasked, has taken up cooking for the whole crew. A world of recipes heretofore assumed inedible, even toxic, awaits them whenever they step through the doorway. Tent-monkey eyeballs set in a savory jell-o. Milks in every color of every rainbow on every planet in the galaxy. Brussel sprouts.

All that said, the protein bakes are one of his more successful experiments. Which is why Pete’s now trapped by a circle of furious faces, closing in like sharks.

“Hey, hey!” She flips her palms up. “It’s not like we don’t all—it’s not like it’s unnatural or anything.” Desperately, she swivels to Groot, her fingers clawing helplessly inward to her chest. Honesty. Isn’t honesty every parent’s best policy?

“I mean, I do it too. In the shower. All the time! Just, you know, let’s not be wasteful. Of, um, water flow. Not the other—”

“Petra,” Gamora repeats, her ice-queen mask so firmly in place someone will probably have to chip it away later. “You’ve made your point clear.”

“Painfully?” Whatever trace of a grin she can scrounge up wilts faster than Groots leaves when she turned to him.

“Excruciatingly.”

“Not unnatural is not the same as not unmentionable!” This from Mantis, of all people.

“Ten points for pervert,” Rocket mutters. “Five for buzzkill…” He slaps a comforting paw to Groot’s shoulder. “Hey, kid. It ain’t your fault Aunt Petey fried all her brain cells back on Ego.”

Someday soon the rat’s going to be picking his own vertebrae out of his teeth. “Dude. We’re going there? Seriously?”

“You tell me,” he snaps, but Rocket sounds more exasperated than truly pissed. Pete shoves away from the table.

“That’s it,” she says, to nobody in particular. Nobody in this particular room, anyway. “I can’t—I’m down for the count. See you losers tomorrow.”

“Barely evening cycle yet,” says Rocket.

“Whoops, sorry. Must be all those fried brain cells,” Pete says, her voice a little sharp but honestly? Not too bad. She can deal with this. Like everything else, it’s just a setback, a bump in the road towards figuring out what the hell any of them are doing, with Groot, with the rest of their lives…

Except now he’s not looking at her. Pete knows how that’s supposed to make her feel; even more, she knows what it’s calculated to make her feel, set jaw and sulky eyes and all, and could be that’s why all it really makes her want to do is boot Groot straight out the airlock.

Which she is totally and completely above doing. Obviously. Since she’s the bigger person. Obviously. And this is all her fault.

Obviously.

“Sorry for spoiling your dinner, kid.” She manages one of those apologetic smiles that about breaks her face every time, and then she leaves, quick, before she throws something.

+

In her better moods, there’s a lifetime’s worth of crap taking up permanent residence under Pete’s bunk. In her shitty ones, three boxes isn’t anywhere near enough, and in her truly shitty ones, three boxes is nothing. Dust-motes and toenail clippings compared to what she’s left behind.

Now, dangling somewhere just above shitty, she rolls onto the cardboard-thin mattress, presses the heels of her palms to her closed eyes, and groans.

“You know I say this every day,” she says, “but you didn’t leave me a whole hell of a lot to work with, old man.”

His snort creaks, cobwebs and rust; not a drop of blood left in it. _Girl, I left you all you needed. You can’t ask for more than that._

“I always did.”

_Well. You was always fuckin’ greedy._

Pete hoards her comebacks these days, and to be fair, he isn’t wrong: back on Terra she wanted the stars. Once she was yanked up into them she wanted not the Terra she could return to but the one she’d left behind, Mom’s sweet voice and her soft mouth and her strong arms that scooped Pete up, whirled her into the air and spun her over the grass, squeezed her so tightly Pete couldn’t remember a single second when they weren’t all the other had.

 _All_ , that’s the operative word here. Pete wants everything, and she wants what she can’t have.

She doesn’t open her eyes. “I wish—” She stops almost right away. What does it matter? The voice is already fading, a ghost sinking back into the guts of the ship, and Pete still has to clench her teeth and her fists and her crossed legs, hard as if she’s holding in a piss, to keep her eyes dry when she thinks that someday soon it will be gone for good. He was the first ghost she ever heard in the black; he’ll be the only and the last.

 _Red,_ he rasped, hours after she’d seen him go in a shower of gold, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, see you in the stars. She’d never believed that when she was kid, rolled her eyes all the way through her first funeral, and afterwards Yondu had backed her into a corner and slugged her so hard one of his stupid rings chipped her front tooth. Years later, she ran the tip of her tongue over it, each sharp little grit a stab through the gut, listening.

_It’s over. You hear me, Red? Over and done._

If she scrunched her lids tight enough, held herself still enough, she could imagine him looming over her bunk. Close enough to touch. She could smell him, the crusted engine oil, perpetual morning breath, and sour-sharp B.O. thickening the air around her to a soup.

_Listen: you jump for the first populated system there is, I don’t care what. Leave, don’t ever come back._

A hot blast of breath, straight in her face, like all the times he’d bent, snarling, down to her level when Pete was little. _This ain’t no place to linger._

Like she hadn’t already guessed. Even miles away and surrounded by a battalion of Ravager ships, she caught the echoes; Ego’s screams, the howl and pull of something so dark and deep that, next to it, the black of space seemed bright. Pete made it to the pilot’s chair without looking over her shoulder once—he was there, he had to be. If she couldn’t find faith in him now she never would.

“You should be here,” she says, shifting since one of the bunk’s slats is practically embossing itself on her ass. “For Groot if not for me. You should be watching him grow.”

Pete blinks. Open, empty air as usual. Dishes clatter in the galley.

“I wish you were here,” she says, and because this is her, and that was him, she sounds like a teenager again, ripping into Yondu for some stupid thing—his teeth, his accent, his punches. It sounds like the start of every argument she held over his head for as long as he lived.

+

She allows herself two, three minutes’ worth of deep, cleansing breaths and muffled sniffling before scrubbing her palms across her eyes and admitting that, yeah, she owes the kid another apology—a halfway decent one this time. Which is as far as she’s gotten when Drax, without any ceremony, much less a warning, plunks down on the edge of Pete’s bunk.

The slats creak.

Pete groans.

“I was supposed to be the cool aunt! Not, like, the mean forty-year-old spinster aunt with plastic covers on her couches.”

“You’re nobody’s aunt, Quill,” he says. “Who is Mr. Rogers?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah—gimme a sec.” She sits up, shuffling to the edge so she can sit alongside him, slinging her legs down to the floor and scraping flyaway frizz back behind her ears. “Mr. Rogers teaches Terran kids how to be good people and how applesauce is made and stuff. He lives in a neighborhood with a magic trolley.”

“Magic, you say?” Drax butts in before Pete gets to the part about the whole thing being a TV show. “And how strong is this vehicle?”

On second thought, that can wait. She needs to save her patience. “It went all the way to the Land of Make-Believe. So pretty strong, I guess.”

“Ah. Your Mr. Rogers must be a man of great renown,” he says, satisfied. Drax pats her shoulder. “I see now why you compared me to him.”

 _Be glad he gets comparison,_ Pete thinks. It’s mostly thanks to Rocket—who is not the most patient of tutors—that Drax is finally starting to pick up on linguistic subtleties. This was after teaching Groot an extra sentence or two (conversation starters like “I’m lost,” and “Where’s the bathroom?”) proved to be a colossal waste of everyone’s time; Drax might not be the best student but at least he’s _teachable_.  

Pete says, “Man, I don’t know what I’m going to do to him.”

“You are talking about Small Groot.”

Of them all, Drax is always the most careful to distinguish between the fully-grown Groot they had then and the no-longer-pint-sized, nose-picking Groot they have now. It’s probably the secret to his almost boundless patience with the kid; the patience Pete’s always wished she could siphon off for herself.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry about hurting him, Quill. You already have.”

“No! Really?” She smacks Drax’s shoulder and gets a sore palm for her troubles—Pete swears the dude’s built of rock. “All parents hurt their kids. It’s just...I don’t want that to be what defines us, you know? You and Gamora and Mantis...hell, even Rocket’s so patient with him, and I’m just...I’m just not. I don’t think I can be.” She clears her throat. Talking about her feelings with anything approaching earnestness still makes her feel like an absolute tool most of the time. Doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. “Yondu wasn’t exactly Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“No,” Drax says. “Yondu was Yondu.”

Her chuckle sounds like the exact opposite of a chuckle; Pete turns it into a cough at the last minute. “He chipped, like, three of my teeth. Dude had some fucked-up ideas about raising kids. Some good ones, too, but when I’m dealing with Groot I never remember those. Just the shit.”

Drax doesn’t answer. He could be digesting the protein bake—Rocket’s food tends to require more-than-usual effort in that department—or he could be making a mental note to never let her near Groot again. Fifty-fifty. Who knows? For a good few seconds his silence shuts Pete up, too. Where does she go from here? Does she tell him she thinks she inherited it, that edge, the meanness Yondu could never really overcome, not until the end? He tried, once or twice, he tried so fucking hard remembering those times leaves Pete sick and hating herself. Twenty years down the road, will Groot feel the same?

Well. That’s assuming he’ll care enough to remember her. Some days she has her doubts.

Drax’s heavy hand drops to her shoulder. This time he squeezes, gently by barbarian-warrior standards.

“My Kamaria never reached the age of our Groot.”

Pete looks down, though she knows for a fact his face is impassive. Smoothed over in a way that twists through her heart.

“The equivalent age,” Drax adds. “Tree-years are confusing.”

Pete nods. “Oh, dude. Without a doubt.”

“If she ever had, I do not know how well this advice would have served me, but it’s all I can give you.” His grip on her shoulder tightens. “You’re trying, Quill.”

 _Am I, though?_ she almost asks. Something in his face stops her when she finally looks up.

“Sometimes trying is enough.”

+

“I _am_ Groot.”

Pete comes within an inch of turning on her heel and stalking back to her bunk before reminding herself that trying isn’t enough if you half-ass it. Instead she answers, in her steadiest voice, “One minute and I’m out of your hair, kid. I promise.”

She tries the handle. Still locked.

“Or, hey, the lockpicking threat still stands.”

His room’s dim, the walls and windows pretty much encrusted with vines. It smells funky, too. Pungent, loamy, and—sorry, there’s no other word for it—moist. In her rush to get this all over with before she completely loses her nerve, Pete trips over a root the size of her arm and nearly rounds out the day buried face-down in Groot’s crunchy, sprouting (Jesus, _sprouting_ ) mattress.  

“Man!” she snaps. “What is this, a compost heap?”

“I am Groot.” He jabs his arm at the still-open door.

“A minute, I know.” She takes it out of her pocket, slaps it down on his equally filthy desktop. “You know what this is?”

Groot rolls his eyes. “I am Gr—”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s a credit,” Pete says, resisting the urge to roll her eyes right back. Bad example and all that. She taps the palm-sized platinum-colored disk. “First one I ever earned.”

They were a special deal, commemorative credits minted for some once-colonized, now-liberated world’s bicentennial. The irony of Yondu, a former slave himself, gypping the people you’d assume he’d identify with the most was lost on her at the time. She taps the credit again.

“I’m giving it to you,” Pete says.

Groot’s already saucer-sized eyes widen, but he doesn’t say a word. He folds his arms and waits.

“There were...four of these. I think? Four or five in a museum. They were coated with this precious metal that got all mined out years before, so I think Yondu’s plan was to sell them to get melted down on the black market. He let us keep one, though, as a trophy. He let me keep it.”

She never did think it was a ploy to make her life harder, even the rest of the crew was so pissed Pete dodged kicks, sucker punches, and one or two borderline assassination attempts for weeks afterwards. At least not just a ploy. When it came to showing approval, Ebenezer Scrooge (“Ebenezer? What the fuck kind of name is Eben _ez_ er?”) would’ve called Yondu a tightwad. Pete was young enough then to pretend she didn’t care; still. She took what she could get.

(“You come down here now,” he said, low, steady as a rock—she was scrabbling on the slope of the roof, weighed down by the stupid credits, the screech of the alarms going at her nerves like sandpaper, her pants soaked with a whole lot more than sweat— “Slide right down. ‘S okay. I’ll catch you.”)

“Said I was the one who actually lifted it with my own two hands, so I could do whatever I wanted with it—so I just held on. Anyway. It’s yours now.”

“I am Groot.”

The merry flame of annoyance constantly smoldering behind her eyes these days leaps higher, not so much for Groot but for the person she used to be: Pete-who-was is spookily, maddeningly similar to Groot-who-is. Neither of them can just _accept_ a gift. Nope. No way. They’ve gotta make you squirm for it.  

“My minute’s up,” she says.

With a kindling-sharp crack Groot’s right arm shoots out, branching into a web of roots across the doorway. “I am Groot!”

Pete growls. Jams her hands into her pockets. “So you’re just that dumb, Sunflower? Come on. I want you to have something you can...remember me by. I guess.”

Groot’s arm retracts. He stumps over to the desk, a filament curling out ahead of him to poke at the credit.

“I am Groot?”

“Uh-huh. Yondu too.”

He cried every night for at least a month after the funeral. Pete would carry him cupped between her hands to the Quadrant’s biggest window, the Zune jammed in her pocket. They’d sit curled against the glass, switching the headphones every other song, both of them sniffling in the dark.

Yondu loved Groot. She might have predicted it, if she hadn’t been so busy being a self-absorbed jackass. He always did have a soft spot for the scrappy ones.

“He’d want me to pass it on,” she says now.

Groot weighs the credit in his hands. He looks up at her.

“Listen, I’ve said so much shit I wish I hadn’t. And I’m going to say more, probably, because I’m kind of a shitty person, but I want you to know I’m working on it, because I care about you and I don’t want you to feel like a total loser. Or, you know, hate me. I don’t want you to hate me.” Pete begins backing towards the door. “So, you keep that and know I do care, okay?”

She can’t get a read on the kid’s expression—at least he’s not rolling his eyes or flipping her the bird. “I don’t want you and me to be like me and Yondu,” she adds. “Keeping it all bottled up until the end. That’s not how families are supposed to work.”

He shrugs. Aggressively. Then snaps, “I am Groot?”

Like he doesn’t already know. Time was a question like that would have gutted Pete. Now it only stings. Small steps.

“Oh, yeah,” she answers, only a little unsteady. “God, yeah. Every day.”

+

She slides the box back under her bunk. It’s half as heavy without the credit. Pete wonders if she’ll ever really like the surly, growling, _mean_ version of the sapling who used to make nests in her hair. 

She laughs.  

“Man, now I know how you felt.”

(“Girl. Now.”

And alarms are screaming, and her heart’s bursting out of her throat, pulsing bloody, and wind, air, rakes past her like fingernails, and her stomach splatted to the pavement a long time ago, and she’s not going to make it, no, no way, yet somehow, somehow, she knows—

Every time, he’ll be there to catch her when she falls.)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Father and Son" by Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens.
> 
> You can find me on [ tumblr](https://mapleymood.tumblr.com/) and [ dreamwidth](https://maplemood.dreamwidth.org//). My tumblr tag for inspiration related to this series is [ here](https://mapleymood.tumblr.com/tagged/girl%21peter).


End file.
